María Ruido, a member of the international research platform Decentralized Modernities, has been awarded the prestigious grant from the Academia de España en Roma to develop her project De amor y rabia.
DE AMOR Y RABIA
De amor y rabia (Of Love and Rage) is a film-essay and photomontage project that seeks to explore the cultural, sexual, political, and social revolution that began in Italy during the 1960s, flourished in the 1970s, and waned in the 1980s. While the political cycle surrounding counterculture extended across the West during the 1960s and 1970s, in Italy it developed with unique characteristics and an exceptional intensity, where antagonistic struggles emerged between revolutionary momentum and an underlying conservatism that would later resurface forcefully with Silvio Berlusconi.
The project will begin with a prologue, focusing on a vibrant counterculture and a powerful feminist movement. The core section will center on the relationship between the sexual revolution and the political revolution in the 70s and the challenge to the traditional models of family and woman, as well as on the anti-pornography vs. anti-censorship debate that took place in Italy from the development of the porn industry, and especially, from the phenomenon of the actress and politician Ilona Staller / Cicciolina. Finally, the epilogue of the essay will reflect on the culmination of conservatism marked by Giorgia Meloni’s rise to power in 2022.
MARÍA RUIDO
Filmmaker, visual artist, researcher and professor. Currently based in Madrid and Barcelona, she is a professor in the Department of Art and Visual Culture at the University of Barcelona. Her work primarily focuses on visual essays, performance, and photomontage.
Since 1998, she has been developing interdisciplinary projects on the social construction of the body and identity, the imaginaries of labor in post-Fordist capitalism, and the construction of memory and its relationships with narrative forms of history. In recent years, she has created visual essays and texts exploring new imaginaries of decolonization and their emancipatory potential.
Among her notable visual essays are: La memoria interior (2002), Tiempo real (2003), Ficciones anfibias (2005), Plan Rosebud 1 (2008) + Plan Rosebud 2 (2008), Zona Franca (2009), Lo que no puede ser visto debe ser mostrado (2010), ElectroClass (2011), Le rêve est fini (2014), El ojo imperativo (2015), Mater Amatísima (2017), Estado de malestar (2019), La revolución (es) probable (2022), and Las reglas del juego (2022).
Image: Grupo Rivolta Femminile de los años 70.
